CBC trying to pin evacuation faults on Harper

In an article on the CBC website yesterday, the state-run broadcaster tries to label the Conservative government’s evacuation of Lebanese-Canadians from Lebanon as slow.

The article even gives a subtitle to a section of the article which we anticipate will be critical of the evacuation effort. The subtitle reads “Criticize evacuation work“.

The CBC reports,

Protesters also criticized Harper’s support of the Israeli mission and the slowness of the Canadian evacuation from Lebanon.

and the supporting quote that it offers has nothing to do with Harper’s evacuation efforts at all:

“Mr. Harper doesn’t represent the opinions of the Canadian people by unconditionally supporting Israel,” said Jerome Charaoui. “Canada should not support Israel, a country that is perpetuating war crimes.”

The CBC asserts that there are protestors that decry the “slow” response by the government on the evacuation efforts. The CBC even writes up a paragraph leading into what one might assume to be evidence supporting the network’s claim. Instead we just get some twit ranting about war crimes. The rest of the subsection is also weak on evidence on protesters complaining about the “slow” response.

Granted, it’s likely that there was somebody at the protests that thought the government’s response was “slow” but the CBC does not provide a supporting quote. The leading paragraph and the quotation are disjoint. This represents wishful reporting by the CBC coupled with weak follow-through.